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Mgt 5103 - Best Practices for E-Discovery Wiki:IT or Legal - Who's NOW in Charge of Information?
The roles of IT and the roles of the legal department have been totally altered because of e-discovery. E-discovery is just one of the many facets of investigation. In the past IT gathered data for the discovery phase of litigation and passed it off and then it went out of house and back in house for analysis before being presented to the decision makers. IT is now able to offer a more efficient and more in-depth analysis at a fraction of the cost because of the innovations that have taken place in technology. The IT folks can now do all the work leading up to the decision – they collect and analyze. The need for change has been driven by the massive amounts of information produced, the retention policies, the applications and the people we have interacting with the information. All of this required the development of tools that could address this so that organizations could avoid the costs associated with discovery when it has become so much more complex compared to the past, IT has been able to add much more in strategy and connecting the dots between the different groups, information governance, compliance officers, regulatory concerns, etc – there is so much more to consider. Legal departments now rely on IT to provide way more than data and could not function without them. So who controls the data – IT. Good news for all of the IT folks in the room. With your IT background and MIM you too can control the universe. E-Discovery & Data Forensics There are subtle differences between e-discovery and data forensics. Forensics is mainly criminal discovery and e-discovery is more about civil litigation. Having said this, it is the spectrum of discovery and the emphasis on workflow that determines what is considered evidence. You can use the same software to do both things and from the user perspective it would look very different and yet from the software developer it would look the same but with different interfaces. So even though there is a difference between civil and criminal discovery, the software products available can assist with both discoveries by flipping one bit of the product. The important thing is to provide the professionals (lawyers, paraprofessionals, support staff) with the support they need to make decisions about the data.The data can come from thousands of documents and there can be hundreds of decision makers involved. There can also be a cross-over in interest between forensic accountants who need access to emails about spreadsheets and legal counsel who need to wade through vast information stores.It starts to become very complex. In this context you can begin to see that having IT play a more significant role in connecting all the dots. Who Controls the Process Here's the process: #Forensic investigations - gather data from upstream #Analytics companies process it #Appply even higher analytics #Final Decision makers None of them ever sat down and said "Hey, you do this job and I'll do that job." It was more a function of the tools they used and technology dictated the roles. For years IT folks have said they could do more and legal would push back saying you just do collection. Now with the advent of e-discovery IT are able to demonstrate that all the work that was being outsourced and costing the company tons of money can all be completed with the simple click of a button. The role of the IT specialist has moved beyond simply gathering data with the use of technology. Prior to e-discovery IT would then pass this data to an analytics company, then back to be analyzed internally and finally pass the results onto the decision makers. With more involvement from IT the two middle steps are eliminated as well as the cost associated it with it and the role of the IT specialists really encompasses information management and analysis as well. The savings in cost and time is significant.